While current facsimile (or “fax”) transmission systems provide a useful means of communicating documents and other information to human recipients, they suffer from various problems. One such problem is that current fax systems provide little opportunity for a human recipient to control the delivery or routing of a fax document, regardless of whether that fax was sent from/to a conventional fax machine or a computer-assisted fax system. While such recipient control functionality would be useful to virtually any fax recipient, it is particularly beneficial in certain situations.
For example, in situations in which an incorrect telephone number is provided to a sending fax machine, the sending fax machine will attempt to deliver a fax document to a destination telephone station that is not attached to the intended destination fax machine (e.g., to a telephone handset used for voice calls by a human, such as someone other than the intended human recipient). When using a conventional fax machine, a human operator sending the fax may be able to manually detect when the recipient of the call is not a fax machine (e.g., by hearing a human voice on the sending fax machine's speaker) and correct the problem so that the current fax is sent to the correct destination fax machine. However, automated fax systems are not typically monitored by an operator, and thus the sender of a fax document using such a system will not immediately detect such a problem. Even if the sender is eventually informed that the fax was not delivered, the sender may not know why the delivery problem occurred, and thus the delivery problem may not be correctly addressed. Moreover, if the incorrect telephone number was obtained in an automated manner (e.g., retrieved from a computer database), the automated fax system may repeatedly attempt delivery to that same incorrect phone number for this and/or other fax documents to be transmitted to the same intended destination.
Another problem arises in situations where an intended human recipient of a fax uses the same telephone number for both voice calls and fax calls. For example, if the human recipient answers a fax telephone call, the destination fax machine may not be able to be activated to receive the fax even if the destination fax machine is currently available (e.g., if the transmitting fax machine timeouts before the recipient can manually activate the destination fax machine). Conversely, the destination fax machine may be temporarily unavailable when a fax telephone call is received (e.g., while the recipient is using the telephone line for a voice call), and if so the recipient may prefer to have incoming fax documents delivered to another fax machine that is currently available via another telephone number. However, neither automated fax delivery systems nor conventional facsimile machines offer a solution to this problem.
Yet another problem occurs when an intended recipient of a document does not have a fax machine attached to the telephone line that was used for the attempted fax delivery. That recipient may wish to have an incoming fax document delivered to an alternative telephone number or instead not delivered at all. In the case where no delivery is desired, the recipient may also wish to provide a message for the sender.
Existing fax machines and automated fax systems do not currently provide satisfactory solutions for such problems, and as a result important fax documents are sometimes delayed and/or lost without the knowledge of either the sender or the recipient. Thus, there is a need for techniques to solve the above problems and to provide additional related functionality.